


Your Local Wizards

by Reading Redhead (readingredhead)



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Drabble Collection, F/M, First Date, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Partnership, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-23
Updated: 2012-04-27
Packaged: 2017-10-31 15:02:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readingredhead/pseuds/Reading%20Redhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of Young Wizards drabbles, all under 1000 words. Tags will be updated to reflect content as new drabbles are posted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Date Night

Nita spent half an hour getting ready for the date, and approximately another half an hour berating herself for taking so much time. _It’s just Kit!_ she thought, as she flung yet another unsuitable top down on her bed in frustration. _You didn’t used to think about what you wore when you saw him._

Of course, now he was her _boyfriend_. It had been a month or so now but she still blushed a little at the word. She’d probably never get back at him for making her say it a second time.

But the nerves she was fighting were less about Kit being her boyfriend and more about this being their first real date. Between school and errantry and wanting to give their respective families some time to adjust, they just hadn’t had the time before now. They had found their fair share of free moments for talking, and for kissing (which was pretty great), and for just hanging out, but the other day Kit had told her he wanted to take her out on a _real_ date, dinner and a movie or something.

So here she was standing in front of her closet with approximately half the contents of said closet strewn across her bed and desk and absolutely no idea what to wear, and it was driving her _crazy_.

In the end, Nita decided on a simple black skirt and a tank top she’d bought last month because its pattern reminded her of fractal sequences they’d been studying in math. She fished a pair of sandals out of the bottom of her closet (it was getting too hot for real shoes), put her wallet, keys, phone, and wizard’s manual (just in case) into her purse, and headed downstairs to wait for Kit.

For all her agonizing, she was still ready ten minutes before Kit was supposed to show up. She’d just finished one book and didn’t have time to get into another, so she settled down on the living room couch and turned on the TV. On screen, a tall thin man with dark curly hair and impossible cheekbones pulled on a scarf and popped up the collar on his well-tailored coat. Nita smiled and thanked the Powers that PBS showed BBC reruns. BBC America wasn’t included in the cable package. Illegal downloading was probably in violation of the Wizards’ Oath. And it wouldn’t help the overlays if an American wizard popped over to Ireland on a weekly basis to watch British TV with a friend of hers.

“I thought he had a different coat last time. Brown, and longer?” Kit was standing in the entrance to the living room, having arrived with impressive stealth—or maybe Nita had just been engrossed in the action onscreen. She hit the mute button on the remote as he came over and plopped down on the couch next to her.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Wrong show,” she said. She leaned into him, any remaining nerves banished by the way he shifted his arm up and around her shoulder so she could nestle in closer. This was warm and comfortable and _right_. How could she have been worried? He was her boyfriend, but really, that was just another word for partner—and they’d been _that_ from the start.

“Does British television consist entirely of funny-looking men with memorable outerwear?” Kit asked.

Nita laughed. “All the good bits,” she said.

“Does this mean I have to go find a quirky jacket in order to retain your attention?”

“That’s one option.” She looked up at him and her smile matched his. “You could also just kiss me.”

“Seems more cost-effective.”

“Kit!” she squealed in mock-indignation, pushing away from him, but he caught her hand and drew her back toward him and kissed her, and she didn’t complain in the least.


	2. Impact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After an intervention that can't be hidden creates a climate of fear and confusion around the presence of wizards, Tom and Carl discuss their options.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to a prompt from soulsuckingisaacnewton: "Earth's wizards go public, by force or intentionally, as you choose." Please excuse total lack of rigorous science with regards to the explanation for wizardry going public; that bit is all my fault.

For weeks after the asteroid’s successful deflection, all of Earth’s wizards were on high alert. Carl reflected, when he had a spare moment to reflect, that at least all this had come to a head in the summer, when most young wizards were out of school and would hopefully have the time at hand to deal with the world’s sudden focused interest in their existence.

He had nightmares about the final working still – a mass of people, gathered on a platform of solid water woven out over the Atlantic, desperately converging in this spot and channeling all the energy they had upward and outward to halt the progress of an asteroid that, if they failed, could cause tidal waves along the eastern seaboard, destroy their homes, and disrupt the local microclimate – after which their own deaths would have seemed minor. It had taken enough power to carve the asteroid up into smaller pieces, to slow them down, to deflect them from areas of population density, and even Carl had lost consciousness as soon as the spell had been powered and let loose.

He woke from the dreams, then and now, into a brave new world. Those wizards involved in the intervention had spent all of their energy preserving their planet. There had been none left over for them to disguise themselves. The average person is very good at ignoring the peripheral use of wizardry that may, on occasion, intersect with normal life – but to explain away the diversion of a giant asteroid, to discount the evidence of the many satellites that had tracked its course and lingered over the images of its destruction, went far beyond what the average person had practice ignoring.

Carl didn’t know if he’d ever get used to Irina’s face all over the newspapers, her accented words echoing on a loop through countless talk shows and news programs: “For as long as Earth has had sentient life, it has had wizards, to protect that life.” But for every news organization that covered her measured explanation, there were three others wailing about the apocalypse; for every government that kept its head, there were twenty others ready to make this an excuse for war.

Irina had refused, point-blank, to comply with the demands of the many national and extra-national forces who had thought themselves entitled to a listing of Earth’s wizards. She maintained that her role in this crisis was merely to act as spokesperson, and to work toward an integrated future. There were no laws relevant to all this – not yet – but Carl suspected it was only a matter of time. Already wizardly advocacy groups had begun to form across the country, wizards and allies contacting each other, assessing the state of their jobs and their lives, deciding if they could afford to campaign for the rights they deserved, but that fear would be quick to deny them.

Tom talked about getting involved in the movement. “I know a thing or two about words and how to use them,” he said, as they lay awake together, bodies huddled close in the darkness. “And I’ve got enough connections who’d die for the kind of scoop I could give them.”

“Might ruin your chances at other jobs, in the long run,” Carl said.

“It might,” Tom said. “But you’ve always been the _real_ breadwinner – good steady job, a proper businessman with your suits and your ties. How you ever condescended to be snatched up by a bohemian like me, I will never understand.”

“You were a very _handsome_ bohemian,” Carl said, curling an arm possessively across Tom’s stomach. He willed the smile in his voice to spread to his heart, but the reality of their situation – talking in the dark, detachedly calm, about a new discrimination they couldn’t help but face – stopped it cold.

“We could get by on what I make,” Carl said, after a few moments’ thought. “If we needed to.”

“What if someone finds out you live with a wizard?”

Carl shrugged, his shoulders moving against Tom’s back. “They’d probably be more scandalized that I live with another man – and anyone who’s going to have _that_ thought about me has had it already.” But he couldn’t suppress the frustration that flared within him at the supreme injustice of it all. People were afraid of what they didn’t understand, but how to make them understand you, when they were so afraid?

A month ago, Carl thought, he and Tom had been normal people, at least as normal as people could be who were also wizards. They went to work, paid the bills on time, complained about whose turn it was to do the dishes, walked the dogs, had fights and made up and loved each other as deep and as well as they knew how.

Tom sighed, the sound half-muffled by his pillow. “I thought I was done with coming out.”

“You don’t have to,” Carl said. But he knew Tom, and he knew what he had decided.

“Better it be me. At least I’ve had practice?”

“At least this time,” Carl said, “you won’t have to do it on your own.”


	3. Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was strange, at first, this whole "having a best friend" thing, and Nita kept worrying that she might be doing it wrong. Set directly post-SYWTBAW.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for playingjax, who asked for a fic that wouldn't spoil past SYWTBAW.

It was strange, at first, this whole "having a best friend" thing, and Nita kept worrying that she might be doing it wrong. She never doubted that that was what Kit was to her, however accidentally they'd been thrown together (though Tom said, when she asked, that with the Powers in charge he wasn't sure he believed in accidents). She hadn't had a best friend before, but somehow she knew this was what a best friend looked like. She just didn't know what, exactly, to do with that knowledge.

It was stranger still because he was a wizard (and so was she) and because he was a boy (but she tried not to think about that too much, she didn't need a boyfriend, and anyway having a best friend was wonderful and difficult enough). In those first weeks after their Ordeal she made a point of giving him space. She didn't want to be that girl who kept him from doing guy things (whatever those might be) with guy friends (assuming he had any) and she didn't want to be that girl he only talked to because wizardry had thrown them together. But he always called her back, sometimes even when it was her turn to call, and they never ate lunch alone anymore, and Nita stopped worrying about being friends with a wizard and a boy and started to enjoy being friends with _Kit_ , who was so much more than that.

Other people didn't understand. Dairine teased her about her mysterious boyfriend, her mother asked seemingly casual questions that were obvious ploys for information, and her father didn't seem to know whether to look pleased or concerned every time she mentioned Kit's name. Joanne didn't beat her up anymore, but the boys who'd made up that song about Kit had added in a new verse about the girl with the mousy hair and glasses who followed him everywhere. It ought not to have bothered her, but it did -- not so much for herself, but for what Kit would think (which was how she knew he was really her best friend, even if that was just part of the problem). 

It was strange, at first, to be with someone she didn't have to hide herself from. And at first, it was scary. One night Nita lay awake looking over every character of her name, traced out in the Speech, and wondering what Kit might think of her from reading it -- what it might let him see that no one else even bothered to look for. She was surprised by how much of her was in there, everything from her eyesight to her favorite cartoons, her middle name to the last book that had made her cry, her worry at her family's occasional money troubles to her frustration with her mousy hair. She was even more surprised to realize that she didn't mind Kit knowing all of it.

The next time they spelled together, constructing the pattern in the dirt beneath a canopy of overarching trees, Nita sat back on her heels and looked over the diagram with a shrewd glare.

"It's not balancing," Kit said.

"I know," Nita said, running the math over in her head once more to make sure. "It was fine last week."

Kit shrugged. "The Manual said things like this could happen," he said. "We need to account for shifting conditions and allow the spell to reflect them."

"It looks like the names are the part that's out of balance," Nita said, standing up. "Double-check mine, will you?"

They switched places again. Nita had given Kit's name the usual perfunctory skim a minute before, but this time she slowed herself down, checking symbols in her Manual to ensure she was fully comprehending their meaning. Everything looked fine -- nothing different from the last time they'd tried this spell together -- and then Nita got to the end, and saw a few symbols she hadn't encountered before. She looked them up, and felt herself blushing, but smiling. To his representation of himself in the language of truth and of Life, Kit had added a phrase naming her as his friend and his partner.

"I think I know the problem," she said, standing up and skirting the edge of the circle.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She smiled, knelt down beside Kit where he was still perusing her name, and added with a few deliberate strokes the same phrase she had found appended to Kit's name. "That should do it," she said, dusting off her hands and meeting his fierce smile with a broad grin of her own. "Partner."


End file.
